Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Kakabeka Falls are on the TransCanada Highway
30 km west of Thunder Bay. At 40 meters, it is the second highest waterfall in
Ontario. (The much better-known Niagara
is only 11 meters higher.)

Not only is it a very pretty waterfall, Kakabeka
comes with a great story… An Ojibwe
Chief instructed his daughter, Princess Green Mantle, to devise a plan to
protect her people from an imminent Sioux invasion. She entered the Sioux camp
along the Kaministiquia River and, pretending to be lost, bargained with them to
spare her life if she would guide them to her father’s camp. Placed in the bow
of the lead canoe, she instead led the warriors and herself over the falls to
their deaths. The legend claims that one can see Green Mantle when looking into
the mist of Kakabeka Falls, a monument to the princess who gave her life to
save her people…

If I’d remembered that story when I was painting this
I would have included her in the picture.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

In my Review of 2016/Plan for
2017 blog post earlier this month, I said I’d produced
10 poems using 'found' haiku and computer-stylized versions of my Canadian
landscape paintings, and I was going to compile up to 50 of these poems on
computer-stylized landscapes.

I don’t actually
have 50 Canadian landscapes (that I like) painted, so I’ll be adding to the
supply between blog posts about my travels.

I hope to concentrate on parts
of Canada I haven’t painted much before, and this isn’t a great start on that
aspect of the project. This location,
Canmore, is just a few miles downriver from Banff, which I have painted many
times.

My next one will definitely be
in a province other than Alberta or British Columbia.

Friday, January 20, 2017

From the outset, the Scottish Parliament building and its
construction were controversial. Begun in 1999 with completion planned for
2001, it actually opened in 2004, £400 million over-budget. The design won
numerous awards including the 2005 Stirling Prize, and, according to Wikipedia,
has been described as a tour de force of Arts & Crafts design and quality
‘without parallel.’ It also placed fourth in a 2008 poll on what UK
buildings people would most like to see demolished.

I think the driver on the tour bus Keara and I were on in 2007
might have been one of the folks who placed this building so high in the
demolition rankings the following year. We drove by so fast that, by the time
he even mentioned what it was, we'd missed most of it.

On to Glasgow, where I had been looking forward to showing Keara
the Gallery of Modern Art. It’s housed
in the iconic former Stock Exchange building, the columns and façade of which had been
undergoing a major cleaning the last time I was in Glasgow. It was a little
disappointing to find that the cleaning had apparently gone so well that they
decided to wrap the elegant Corinthian capitals snugly in layers of black
netting to keep them clean and pigeon-free.

There really are some stags rampant guarding the base of the statue in front of St. Giles. Here’s a close-up of two of them.And here's the picture of Keara I used to paint St Giles. She is wearing the soccer shirt we had just bought because we were freezing. In July.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Friday, 27 July: We arrived at Oxford station in
good time for the train to Paddington, the first leg of a fairly complicated
five-stage trip to Inverness…. But, as we learned at the gate onto the platform,
the main line to Paddington was undermined and had been closed all week!
Fortunately for us, railway employees all carry computers with which they can
reorganize even the most confused travellers and, by a totally different route,
we caught up to our original itinerary in Sterling, where we were finally able
to sit in the seats I had reserved weeks before.

Here’s Keara, on the
left below, in front of our hotel in Inverness, and on the right her view of Inverness
Castle, directly across the river.

I actually did this painting, a Virtual Paintout entry, quite recently. When I’d first learned the Virtual Paintout
was to be in Scotland, I had mentioned that I might try the Scottish Parliament
and when one of the people who had heard me say that saw this painting he said,
“So that’s what the Scottish Parliament looks like… what’s so controversial about
it?” You’ll see in my second post about our time in Edinburgh, a few days from now.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Saturday, 21 July: In the morning, a wonderfully
funny presentation by Colin Dexter was accompanied by cataract off roof into
garden where kids were splashing around, allegedly learning about “Lyra’s
Oxford.” Evening cataract-accompanied presentation on CS Lewis again featured
kids splashing about in the garden apparently having a drama workshop – looks
very much like learning about Lyra’s Oxford.

Sunday, 22 July:
Tewkesbury “like a war zone, with water treatment plant

overwhelmed, homes west
of Oxford evacuated.” We got as far as the Folly Bridge before discovering our
river cruise had been cancelled – Thames (called Isis, in Oxford) too high and
too fast. We had a walking tour along it – yes, it was high and fast – to
Oxford Tower, instead.

Monday, 23 July: “One of the electricity
sub-stations in Gloucester succumbed, cutting off power to 48,000 homes – if
the other one had gone, emergency services would have had to launch the biggest

evacuation of people since the Second World War.” We were on the ground floor of our hotel so,
before departing for our day at Warwick Castle, I put our suitcases on the
dresser in our room, despite assurances that ‘we’re higher than the University
and the University isn’t going to flood. We saw a lot of flooding on the way to
Warwick, including the river raging past the castle, but our hotel was fine –
put suitcases back on floor again.

Tuesday, 24 July:
Last night, “100 firefighters and 150 Royal Marines and Gurkhas saved the day,”
and we were assured flood had peaked. However, still much concern about sewage
in water apparently not yet receding in “watery ghost towns” so put suitcases
back up before departing for day at Blenheim Palace (On the left are Keara and
a friend from California in the maze there). Sun shone, birds sang; we had a splendid day.
Suitcases back down when we got back.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

In 2007 I took
Keara to a Road Scholar Inter-generational study program in England – Harry Potter school (with a little Inspector Morse thrown in for
the grandparents) in Oxford. Then we went to the European Pipe Band
Championships in Inverness, and visited Edinburgh and Glasgow.

I’ll tell the story in terms of my response to a
question we saw on July 29, in an article in The Independent on Sunday, “Where
were you during the Great Floods of July 2007?” combined with the newspaper’s
notes for the week…

We arrived in Oxford on July 18, the day before the
Road Scholar program was to start, and on July 19, caught the train to
Paddington Station and spent a beautiful sunny day seeing the highlights of
London – Big Ben, the Palace, the Tower, and other photo opportunities.

Friday, 20 July:
We had a lecture on Tolkien, and the kids were making a map of Middle Earth
when the “… heavens opened. Oxfordshire got five inches of rain – normally 90
days’ worth – in five hours” during which we walked around the Oxford Colleges. In the evening, while the kids had their first drama workshop, we
went to one of Inspector Morse’s favourite pubs, the Trout at Wolvercote. The
deck was awash.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The Virtual Paintout is in Puerto Rico this month. After my husband mentioned pristine beaches on the west coast near the former
USAF base at Ramey, I concentrated my search in that part of the island, and
found this colourful sculpture in the centre of the Mayagüez campus of the
Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Travel journaling: I have started a project to expand on the
sketches and paintings my grandchildren and I produced during the trips I took with
them between 2004 and 2013. This will be completed in 2017.

‘Clean energy’ haiku/haiga project: I have produced 10 poems using ‘found’ haiku
and computer-stylized versions of my Canadian landscape paintings. I plan to compile up to 50 of these poems, and may even try to explain some of the non-sequiturs in them!

About Me

Charlene Brown is a Canadian painter who started writing about painting trips during the ten years she and her husband lived in Dubai. The Gulf Weekly began publishing her accounts of painting trips in that part of the Arabian peninsula -- then said they might consider other countries, even such exotic locations as Canada! She had written about painting trips in over twenty countries by the time her husband retired and they returned to Canada to live.